Typically, shoppers browse selections offered by participating on-line merchants by specifying criteria regarding the type of product they would like to find such as the manufacturers product features or price tags. Based on product attributes entered by the shopper into a browser, such as Netscape, the browser interrogates the databases of on-line merchants for the product attributes entered by the shopper into the system. The system ranks the products turned up by the database search based on ranking algorithms which take into consideration various ranking factors, such as the number of occurrences of terms in documents, the proximity of terms to one another within the documents, etc., and provides the products to the seller listed in order of their rank.
While this method helps shoppers locate products and services they desire, it limits the amount of control shoppers have over the shopping environment and experience. Generally speaking, for the same set of database interrogations, each of the shoppers would receive the same set of results and in the same order. To tailor the presentations to the shopper, a number of systems analyze the on-line behavior of the shopper to vary characteristics and elements of the displays presented to the shoppers to the individual shopper's preferences and needs. The shopper's characteristics that may be used to tailor the presentations would include previous data on stores visited, time of the visit, length of the visit, merchandise viewed, purchases made, frequency of visits, etc. In addition, as described in the above mentioned U.S. patent application, Ser. No. 10/054,301, a weighting factor can be added by a seller to promote certain products. The weighting factor is combined with existing ranking mechanisms to the documents to increase the probability that certain items come to the top when the search results are presented to the shopper. These pages could be used to ensure shoppers do not overlook special offers or to reduce overstocks by promoting products with a large inventory. The weighting factor is configured so as to not decrease the shoppers confidence in the ranking process. Internet service providers also can provide a vehicle for sellers to skew search results to promote products. U.S. Pat. No. 6,269,361B1 provides a scheme where bidding affects the ranking of search results of a network information provider.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a new way for an on-line merchant to emphasize products to on-line purchases.
Another object of the invention is to provide a new way to express a consistent marketing strategy.
It is another object of the invention to provide a way for merchants to promote certain products and services while avoiding promotion schemes of other merchants.